When Science Gets it Wrong

And 4 surprising sources about how to eat right

Americans are deeply confused about what to eat. Many of us feel so much despair we’ve become cynical and jaded.

“Why bother?,” we exclaim, as we reach for a bag of chips and a diet coke.

Some of us double-down, with daily HIIT and 1,200-calorie diets, blending green smoothies with agave syrup instead of sugar, or dispensing Stevia into our coffee.

Science has turned out to be fairly useless when it comes to dietary advice, and I have a few theories as to why. In this article, I cover:

— why science can’t seem to agree on the “right” answer

— where to find sound nutritional advice

The original confusion is clear: we are omnivores, meaning humans will adapt to most diets, hence the popularity of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the reason your teenager hasn’t died from living on nachos and Red Bull.

Second, our culture has adopted a vague but satisfying premise: eat more grains, vegetables, and fruits and stop worrying! I will explain later why this is idiotic.

Third, science isn’t stupid. It isn’t going to spend money on a problem unless there is money to be made. Advising people to eat more apples or beef liver won’t make anyone rich.

The Omnivore Dilemma (my version)

We are like bears and ants: we can consume anything non-poisonous with calories, and we do. Protein and fat are non-negotiable, whereas carbs are tasty and quick energy sources but not required. It doesn’t matter whether we eat bugs or beefsteak, if we get sources of protein and the essential fatty acids we are happy campers.

The average teenage diet — Pepsi, chips, pizza — manages to sustain people for years. This fact alone muddies the waters. How do they get away with it? Once most of us reach our 30s, we lose our taste for double-cheese pizza because it makes us fat and 1 slice leads to self-recrimination.

Science has tried to compare and contrast weight-loss diets and concluded both low fat and low carb diets are effective, whether short and long term. There is an ongoing debate about whether it’s easier to maintain a plant based diet that eschews fat or a meat-filled regimen with no sugar.

Some pundits claim low carb is terrible for health because it has lots of saturated fat. On the other side, sugar busters shake their heads and roll their eyes at people who insist on eating pies and cookies.

“Bacon tastes too good to be healthy!” So shout the puritans.

“Sugar is the Devil’s third hand!” So testify the Keto crowd.

If we can eat anything, and if teenagers survive — why does it all go south somewhere in our 30s? What goes wrong?

The Vegan Dilemma

The vegan diet allows no animal products, including butter and honey. It is not a diet any culture, ever, has practiced. This should end the argument. We need animal products to sustain life.

Vegan diets take the “all-natural” theory to a bizarre extreme.

But since veganism is a lifestyle, not a diet, trying to argue with vegans leads nowhere. Non-vegans are debating people who have been poisoned by ideology.

But wait a sec —don’t our official USDA guidelines suggest we eat more whole grains, vegetables, and fruits?

Yes, and there is good evidence the USDA went rogue in 1972 when it concluded a high grain diet was optimal. I’m not saying vegetables and fruits are a problem, only pointing out no traditional culture in the history of humankind has ever prioritized plants over meat. The Seventh Day Adventists are relatively new.

Then there are the famous Blue Zone people, who are the longest-lived cultures on earth. All of them eat a lot of plants, particularly legumes. They also eat eggs, fish and/or meat. They are omnivores who eat fat when it’s available.

So, back to original problem: we can eat nearly anything.

The Money Dilemma

Most scientists are pure of heart, but science itself is a machine that runs on money like your car runs on gas and oil. Funders of scientific experiments want pills and potions that solve problems, thereby selling like hotcakes to line the pockets of bloated science executives.

Science is going to keep comparing groups of (modern) people who eat very similar diets, and is further constrained by having subjects report what they ate the day before. We aren’t very good at remembering what we ate this morning, much less yesterday.

Even data analysis seems to get skewed, as in The China Study, which concluded meat was associated with cancer. A second look at the data showed grains that had the strongest association with both cancer and heart disease.

4 Excellent Sources of Dietary Advice

I’ve come across a few sources I trust, partly because they recommend a more traditional diet.

1/ Weston A. Price, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”

Dr. Price was a dentist who traveled the globe in a quest to understand the source of excellent dental health, then wrote a book that should have garnered him a Nobel prize, but the Nobel committee was too busy chowing down on baguettes and congratulating themselves on being “civilized.”

Dr. Price discovered native people had amazing teeth, whether they came from New Zealand or the outer Hebrides. When “natives” began eating civilized foods like sugar, alcohol, white flour, and processed oils, however, their overall health went downhill within a generation, and tooth decay developed — sometimes for the first time in their collective history.

When Native Americans stopped following the buffalo, their health deteriorated. When isolated Swiss people ate less of their local, grassfed cheese and milk, their health deteriorated. When Seminole Indians began to supplement their hunting and fishing with white bread and sugar — same result.

Tribes where cavities were unknown suddenly began developing caries, infections, and malformations. In a family where one sibling ate traditionally and the other ate white men’s food, the differences in facial structure were noticeable.

Dr. Price observed high fat diets, with natural protein sources, were the common denominator. He personally began eating a lot of butter to make sure he was getting all his nutrients. The Weston A. Price Foundation has a cookbook called “Nourishing Traditions” and recommends meat and natural fats as critical to good health.

Price was interested in nutrients, but later readers pointed out that eating foods raw and unprocessed may have had a profound effect on development of jaw and facial structure.

2/ My mom (your grandma)

My mother, Mary, lived by the motto “you can never be too thin or too rich.” But as a child she was fat so like Dr. Price, she went on a quest. Hers was to find the key to youth and popularity. She concluded she should (1) eat less (2) eat few to no carbs (3) eliminate sugar (4) drink no alcohol and (5) go with the flow.

She was forced to quit alcohol and sugar because was diagnosed with “hypoglycemia” at age 40. Turns out the doctors were slightly wrong, because she had bipolar disorder I — but it was 1960s and we all make mistakes.

3/ The Blue Zones

I do not concede the Blue Zone diet has to be mostly vegetarian, but I can’t deny people in Okinawa and Ikaria, for example, are glowing examples of health. Their lifestyles have as much to do with that as their diets.

The Blue Zone diets have something Dr. Price would endorse, because these folks eat traditional, fresh foods. In the Blue Zones, people have been eating the same way for hundreds, maybe thousands, of generations! They are highly adapted to eating local vegetables and/or fruits, meat and/or fish, and whatever other fat sources on hand (olive oil, eggs, etc.)

It would be nice if the scientists studying Blue Zoners would step back from their prejudices about how the answer is grains, fruits, and veggies.

4/ The Four Food Groups

Before the USDA pyramid scheme arrived, there was a simpler way: the four food groups.

(1) Meat (2) Fruits and vegetables (3) Dairy and (4) Grains

It all went to hell when our well-intentioned government started telling us to eat “6–11 servings of grains” a day. Please, USDA, put down the crack pipe. Eating carbs led to diabetes and unprecedented weight gain. Ever since the pyramid advised us to step away from the lard, butter, and bacon — we turned sugar.

Final Biased Thoughts

I believe we are confused because we are addicted to carbs and sugar. It’s impossible to reason clearly when you can’t get through a day without a quick fix from a sugar-laced snack. Please note that sugar is a recent addition to the human diet, gaining traction in the 1600s. White flour is older but hasn’t been around long at all — the past 12,000 years — in evolutionary terms.

I’ve spent most of my life tying to lose weight and not be hungry. The first part is easy: any fool can lose weight. Losing pounds without being hungry all the time is the trick. The solution is to eat fat — satisfying, traditional sources of it including tallow, butter, and fatty cuts of meat.

I won’t sugarcoat it: green smoothies are the devil’s lubricant. I’m sure I’ll rile up the pro-veggie faction, but there it is. We were thin and active for millions of years, then Nabisco stepped in.

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